Phonologically Conditioned Phonetic Changes
Josef Fruehwald, University of Pennsylvania
May 1, 2013
Outline
- Brief Background
- Brief background regarding the conventional wisdom about phonetic changes that I’ll be trying to problemetize.
- Brief background on the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus.
- Two Case studies highlighting the role of phonology in phonetic change
- Pre-voiceless /ay/ raising.
- Pre-consonantal /ey/ Raising
- Conclusions
Background
Conventional wisdom regarding conditioned sound changes:
Natural Physiological / Perceptual Phenomenon
↓
↓
e.g. Hyman (1976); Ohala (1981, 1990, inter alia); Blevins (2004); Bermudez-Otero (2007), cf. Baker, Archangelie & Mielke (2011)
Background
Hypothetical: The effect of coronals on adjacent /uw/. (Ohala, 1981)
Background
Effect of coronals on /uw/ in Philadelphia.
Today
I will be presenting an analysis based on the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus which problemetizes this conventional wisdom.
Pre-voiceless /ay/ raising.
The opaque interaction between /ay/ raising and /t, d/ flapping is in place from the very beginning.
Pre-consonantal /ey/ raising.
The most phonetically favoring context does not undergo the change.
The Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus
- Interviews collected between 1972 and 2010
- Fieldwork associated with the Ling 560 Class
- Goal: interview as many residents on a city block as possible
- 1,107 interviews in catalog from mostly working class neighborhoods
- The PNC
- 358 speakers transcribed and analyzed so far
- Dates of Birth ranging from 1888 to 1991
- 860,000 automated vowel measurements.
Philadelphia Row Homes, 1973
North Philadelphia Row Homes, 1973
North Philadelphia Row Homes, 1973
South Philadelphia Row Homes, 2012
South Philadelphia Row Homes, 2012
Pre-voiceless /ay/ raising
- Relatively recent to the dialect.
In my own speech […] this short sound, as in night or out, seems to be identical with the vowel of but; contrast with [a] in ride, loud. No such distinction is made in the Philadelphia dialect. – Tucker (1944)
- Originally a male let sound change (Labov, 2001)
- Backness of raised variant indexes masculinity & toughness (Conn, 2004; Wagner, 2007)
- This change has progressed linearly over the course of the 20th Century (Labov, Rosenfelder & Fruehwald, 2013)
Pre-voiceless /ay/ raising
Pre-voiceless /ay/ raising
Within words, it is only following voiceless segments which condition raising.
Pre-voiceless /ay/ raising
There is no condtioning of /ay/ raising across word boundaries.
/ay/ Raising and Opacity
In contemporary Philadelphian English, /ay/ raising applies opaquely with respect to /t/ and /d/ flapping.
|
write
|
[ɻʌit]
|
[ɻaɪd]
|
ride
|
|
writer
|
[ɻʌiɾɚ]
|
[ɻaɪɾɚ]
|
rider
|
If /ay/ raising were phonetically conditioned, when did this opacity enter the dialect?
/ay/ Raising and Opacity
- The data: /ay/ followed by /t/ and /d/, in two different conditions.
Surface
- /t/ and /d/ are word final, and followed by a pause.Flap
- /t/ and /d/ are followed by an unstressed vowel within the word.
- Exclusions
- Potential /t/ glottalizing contexts (e.g. frighten, tighten)
- Exceptional raising words (e.g. spider, Snyder (Fruehwald, 2008))
with(ayTD_comp, table(FolSeg, Flapping))
## Flapping
## FolSeg Flap Surface
## D 328 647
## T 240 2155
/ay/ Raising and Opacity
Pre-voiceless shortening is commonly appealed to as the phonetic precursor for /ay/ raising (Joos, 1942; Chambers, 1973) pace Thomas & Moreton (2004).
/ay/ Raising and Opacity
/ay/ Raising and Opacity
To see if /ay/ raising always really patterned according to the underlying voicing, we need to do something more complex than linear regression.
/ay/ Raising Modeling
This is the basic model I fit.
/ay/ Raising Modeling
- Each main effect was modeled using a b-spline over date of birth.
surf_d; t_effect; t_flapping; d_flapping ~ b.spline(DOB)
- Random effects by speaker were also included
(surf_d; t_effect; t_flapping; d_flapping | Speaker)
- Also included were random intercepts for words
(1|Word)
- And a duration effect, and random slopes for that duration effect
Dur_msec + (Dur_msec | Speaker)
- The model was implemented in Stan, and estimated via Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. (4 chains, 3500 burn in, 3500 sampling iterations)
/ay/ Raising Modeling
These are the estimated F1 trajectories from the model with 95% highest posterior density estimate.
/ay/ Modeling
There appears to be a main effect of following flaps being slighly lower, counter to the duration predictions.
/ay/ Modeling
The difference between /t/ and /d/ appears to be identical between the non-flapping and flapping contexts.
/ay/ Modeling
The difference between /t/ and /d/ appears to be identical between the non-flapping and flapping contexts.
/ay/ Conclusions
/ay/ raising has always been sensitive to the phonological, not phonetic voicing of the following segment.
This change did not start out in the most phonetically favoring environment, then generalize to the phonological environment.
There was a categorical phonological process in place at the beginning of the change which corresponded to a small phonetic difference.
ay → -low / _ -voice ]stem
What about analogy
?
- Could raising in write analogize to writer without a phonological process invovled?
- This sort of explanation will not extend to /ey/.
/ey/ Raising
- Identified as a new and vigorous change in the 1970s (Labov 2001)
In long a,
as in day, the first element ranges from [æ] to [a]. The resulting diphthong […] [is] treated in nearly the same way in some English dialects, notably Cockney, where indeed the same tendency has been carried still further ([dɑɪ]). (Tucker 1944)
- Relatively little work has been done on any social meaning attached to /ey/.
- This change has progressed linearly throughout the 20th century (Labov, Rosenfelder & Fruehwald, 2013)
/ey/ Raising
The basic distinction has been previously described as between word-final vs word-internal /ey/.
/ey/ Raising
Preliminary exploratory analysis has found that syllable structure doesn’t matter, just whether the following segment is a consonant (excluding /l/).
/ey/ Raising
But, there is no opacity.
/ey/ Raising
And, it is even conditioned across word boundaries.
/ey/ Raising
A regression for word internal /ey/ shows that /ey/ followed by /l/ was reliably more advanced than before other consonants, but did not undergo the change.
Decade = (DOB-1900)/10
Diag ~ Decade * FolSeg + (FolSeg | Speaker) + (Decade | Word)
|
|
C Estimates
|
|
Interactions
|
|
Intercept
|
0.63
|
t = 15.14
|
|
-0.55
|
t = -4.29
|
FolSeg = V
|
|
|
|
|
0.31
|
t = 2.66
|
FolSeg = /l/
|
|
Decade
|
0.12
|
t = 14.9
|
|
-0.12
|
t = -5.22
|
FolSeg = V × Decade
|
|
|
|
|
-0.1
|
t = -4.18
|
FolSeg = /l/ × Decade
|
/ey/ Raising
/ey/ Conclusions
Despite phonetically favoring the direction of the change, /l/ does not condition it.
This may be evidence for phonological reanalysis of /l/ as a vowel in Philadelphia (Ash 1982; Dinkin 2011).
The conditioning across word boundaries indicates that the phonological process distinguishing /ey/ allophones applies at the phrase level.
ey → +ATR / _ C]phrase
Conclusions
/ay/ raising and /ey/ raising
- Exhibit categorical conditioning from the very onset of the change.
- The contexts selected to undergo the change are not well defined phonetically.
- First is not fastest (cf. Bailey, 1973).
/ay/ raising
- Has never applied across word boundaries.
- Interacts opaquely with flapping.
/ey/ raising
- Appears to apply across word boundaries.
- Interacts transparently with affixing of all varieties.
Conclusions
These results are anomalous with respect to the conventional wisdom that phonological processes start out as phonetically natural biases in production & perceptual errors.
These results are compatible with my hypothesis that phonetic changes target the outputs of a categorical & modularly separate phonological system.
It appears as if the addition of a phonological process to the grammar either preceded the subsequent phonetic change, or that the two began simultaneously.
How??
Mielke (2013): There are generalizations across North American English speakers regarding the distribution of bunched vs. retroflex /r/, a distinction with nearly no acoustic correlates.
Conclusions
The phonology and phonetics of sound change are still not well understood.
Theories of phonological and phonetic change must find validity in sound changes in progress.
The application of new statistical & quantitative methods in concert with a fruitful theoretical framework can uncover new results from well trod areas of research.
References
- Ash, S. (1982). The Vocalization of /l/ in Philadelphia. University of Pennsylvania.
- Baker, A., Archangeli, D., & Mielke, J. (2011). Variability in American English s-retraction suggests a solution to the actuation problem. Language Variation and Change, 23, 347–374.
- Bailey, C.-J. (1973). Variation and Linguistic Theory. Washington.
- Bermúdez-Otero, R. (2007). 21 Diachronic Phonology. In P. de Lacy (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology (pp. 497–517). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Blevins, J. (2004). Evolutionary phonology: the emergence of sound patterns. Cambridge University Press.
- Chambers, J. K. (1973). Canadian Raising. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 18, 131–135.
- Dinkin, A (2011). What’s Really Happening to Short A Before L in Philadelphia? Talk presented at NWAV 40, Washington, D.C.
- Fruehwald, J. (2008). The Spread of Raising : Opacity , Lexicalization , and Diffusion. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, 14(2), 83–92.
- Conn, J. (2005). Of
moice
and men: The evolution of a male-led sound change. University of Pennsylvania.
- Hyman, L. (1976). Phonologization. In A. Juilland, A. M. Devine, & L. D. Stephens (Eds.), Linguistic studies offered to Joseph Greenberg on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday (Vol. 4, pp. 407–418). Anima Libri.
- Joos, M. (1942). A phonological dilemma in Canadian English. Language, 18, 141–144.
- Labov, W. (2001). Principles of linguistic change. Volume 2: Social Factors. Language in Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Labov, W., Rosenfelder, I., & Fruehwald, J. (2013). One hundred years of sound change in Philadelphia: Linear Incrementaion, Reversal, and Reanalysis. Language, 89(1), 30–65.
References
- Moreton, E., & Thomas, E. R. (2004). Origins of Canadian Raising in voiceless-coda effects: a case study in phonologization. In J. Cole & J. I. Hualde (Eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology 9. Cambridge University Press.
- Ohala, J. (1981). The listener as a source of language change. In C. S. Masek, R. A. Hendrick, & M. F. Miller (Eds.), Papers from the Parasession on Language and Behavior. Chicago Linguistics Society.
- Ohala, J. J. (1990). The phonetics and phonology of aspects of assimilation. In J. Kingston & M. E. Beckman (Eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology 1: Between the grammar and physics of speech (pp. 258–282). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- The Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus.
- Stan Development Team. (2012). Stan: A C++ Library for Probability and Sampling. Retrieved from http://mc-stan.org/
- Tucker, R. W. (1944). Notes on the Philadelphia dialect. American Speech, 19(1), 37–42.
- Wagner, S. E. (2007). We act like girls and we don’t act like men: The use of the male-associated variable (ay0) in South Philadelphia. In T. Scheffler, J. Tauberer, A. Eilam, & L. Mayol (Eds.), Penn Working Papers in Linguistics (Vol. 13.1, pp. 393–406). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.